HomeNewsHotmail, Outlook users’ personal data exposed for over two months

Hotmail, Outlook users’ personal data exposed for over two months

April 20, 2019

Hotmail, Outlook users’ personal data exposed for over two months

If you still have a Hotmail account or Outlook account, then here’s some bad news for you. Microsoft has confirmed that a large number of emails from these accounts were exposed to hackers for over two months. According to a report by The Independent, Microsoft has revealed that “email accounts of non-corporate users were breached. The report further reveals that the contents of around 6 per cent of emails exposed by cyber criminals exploiting a customer support portal.

Microsoft reportedly sent an email to the majority of affected users where it said that a “Microsoft support agent’s credentials were compromised, potentially allowing unauthorised access to some account information.”

The account information that was exposed included person’s email address, folder names, subject lines of emails. That’s not all as names of all email addresses users connected with were also exposed. The mails that were exposed were between January 1, 2019 to March 28, 2019. Microsoft said that the content of emails nor the attachments sent/received where exposed.

The report from The Independent further highlights that Microsoft has said it is providing guidance and support to users over this incident. The report quotes a Microsoft spokesperson saying, “We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access.”

It has been a rough few days when it comes to users’ data being leaked. Social media giant Facebook – quite laughably – revealed that it had “unintentionally” leaked email addresses of over 1.5 million users. A day after that confirmation came to light, Facebook this time said that Instagram passwords of 1.5 million users might have been posted in plain text. In other words, passwords of a lot of Instagram users were left exposed online for hackers or cyber criminals to access.